by Zack Smith, guest blogger for Pop Candy

by Zack Smith, guest blogger for Pop Candy

Hey Pop Readers! We've got a chat with an award-winning cartoonist‚?¶and some info on how you can help his plans to aid victims of Hurricane Sandy.

I mentioned at the start of this week, I was a substitute blogger not only for Whitney, but for the planned substitute blogger, Dean Haspiel. You might know Dean's work from any number of places ‚?? he's done tons of graphic novels and webcomics with everyone from Harvey Pekar to Jonathan Ames‚?¶who in turn used Dean as the inspiration for Zach Galifianakis' character on HBO's Bored to Death. Dean won an Emmy for helping create that show's opening credits ‚?? this is a man of many talents.

Dean's always got a lot going on ‚?? from masterminding the webcomics collective Act-I-Vate to doing new comics with his character Billy Dogma and work for many of the big publishers, to the new literary arts salon Trip City with such talented collaborators as Seth Kushner and Jennifer Hayden.

Dean Haspiel: Trip City is a literary arts salon I launched a year ago, last November. It's me and some cool people like Jeffrey Burandt, Chris Miskiewicz and Seth Kushner getting together and putting up stuff that we like that we hope is either topical or more sustainable. It lets me promote my work to fans, to publishers, and flex my creative muscles, doing things like prose.

ZS: It sounds like a very positive experience for you.

DH: It's positive, it's demanding, it's frustrating‚?¶(laughs). But, I have to remind myself, doing something like a Trip City or Act-I-Vate‚?¶no one put a gun to my head! I've challenged myself to do this, to be relevant, to produce new things, to make art.

All artists need a home, especially when they have something they want to do that might not have a place anywhere else ‚?? and Trip City's that kind of home for artists.

It's been a fun experiment, different from Act-I-Vate because it's not just comics. I get it, people like to pigeonhole each other because it's easier to remember them in that way, but we're all human beings, and we all have a bunch of different things we want to try to do.

We just celebrated Trip City's first anniversary on the heels of Hurricane Sandy hitting the East Coast. A lot of our readers are actually on the East Coast and they've been very supportive. Together, we did a year of Trip City and made something great, without even getting paid!

ZS: It's an accomplishment to do anything for a year these days.

DH: Exactly. I want to raise a toast to commitment, because anyone can say something like, "Oh, I want to be a comic book artist," and then you try to do it and realize it's really f***ing hard! (laughs) Either the business of it is really difficult, or sitting down after your regular job or even doing mainstream comics work to supplement your income‚?¶to do that after exhausting yourself at these other things, to trundle forth, it really has to be a passion project. It's not always fun, and that's why so many creators just seem to disappear.

And it's cool to have worked with my collaborators on Trip City and on Act-I-Vate ‚?? people can visit these sites and see my stuff, but they might visit to see these other people and stick around to check out my work, and vice versa.

ZS: You've also been up to some other projects‚?¶

DH: I did two incredible things this summer I want to talk about briefly, because I think they might be interesting to Pop Candy readers.

First, I went to Yaddo, which is the premiere arts residency in America, and I got to spend four weeks there. It was a pretty amazing time. I was given a room in a mansion of 400 acres in beautiful Saratoga Springs, right next to the Saratoga Springs Race Track, and then I'm given my own little writing cabin that I went to every day ‚?? and in those four weeks, I wrote a feature-length screenplay, 60 pages of a novel, and the script for a comic book that I'm drawing right now.

ZS: (Zack's reaction to this redacted due to obscene language)

DH: I've heard that a lot. (laughs) Then, in October, I was asked to be a Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where I worked alongside master artists Ellen Forney and Megan Kelso to help curate submissions for artists and people who want to work in comics.

My focus was on comic book storytelling, so I had to critique submissions from artists who came in and had to show their ability to work with not just story and art, but really use those multidisciplinary forms to tell a story in the comic book format and make it mean something.

I did that for three weeks, and one of the exercises we did was called "A Letter Lasts Longer," where I wrote a piece of text for a comic script with all the visual descriptions removed, and the artists had to derive a story from the text alone ‚?? you can see their pieces online. I think it's a really cool example of the power of comics and collaboration.

ZS: You told me you had to drop out of blogging for Pop Candy because your friends and family got hit by Hurricane Sandy, and you wanted to help them out. How's everything going right now?

DH: I came out of Sandy pretty lucky ‚?? I think I lost cable TV for about 12 hours. I know, poor me, right?

But a lot of people around me‚?¶there were trees that came down, they lost their cars, their homes. My beloved Red Hook got hurt really, really bad, and they're still hurting.

And there's this weird‚?¶I don't know if it was ironic or tragic or just weird, but I'd done a story for IDW's Mars Attacks the Holidays set in a bar/restaurant in Red Hook called Fort Defiance, which is actually a place George Washington used, and I told that history in the story along with the story of the Christmas Truce, where the British and the Germans stopped fighting to have a soccer game on Christmas in the middle of World War I, but I retold it with humans vs. Martians.

The Wednesday that comic came out was two or three days after Fort Defiance had been hurt really bad by Superstorm Sandy and they had no electricity, and had kind of become the Fort Defiance I had drawn into this comic book. I almost felt guilty ‚?? as if I'd made it happen somehow! You can help them out through their website. (linked above)

DH: The other thing I want to mention is that I'll be teaching a storytelling class on Dec. 5 from 6:30 ‚?? 9:30 p.m. at the Society of Illustrators for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art where we'll talk about the virtues of comic book storytelling and workshop a couple of storytelling exercises.